Pleasure, joy, and why we need both.

A thought to take into the New Year.

Pleasure lives in the brain, behind the eyes, at the top of the head. It’s eye-crossing, addictive, explosive, delicious, nauseating if you’ve had too much. Joy lives in the heart, the belly, the core. It cradles you, lights and relights an eternal flame. Its unbelievability and self-evidence live in the same moment. Pleasure is electricity, joy is fire.

Pleasure cannot replace joy. Both feel good and are essential to a happy life, but as society increasingly rewards the pursuit and attainment of pleasure over all else, I think we stand to benefit from making an effort to create joy that takes a little more work. Happiness is a house built of many materials - if we spend all our time glotzing¹, buying, and pressing the cocaine button, who will take care of the masonry? I’m kidding. Kind of.

Joy

This Christmas Eve, like every year, I went to the midnight service at the cathedral in my hometown. I listened to the sermon in a cavernous and ancient space lit only by candlelight. Looked up at the solitary Annaberger star suspended from the vaulted ceiling and tried my best to remember the Vaterunser², having last spoken it a year before. Sang along, stealing glances at faces in the congregation to see if there was anyone I recognised, whispered to my parents if there was. Like every year, I felt a sense of warmth in a cold and stony room. When we left the church, the sky was clearer than I’d seen it in years. Constellations stretched across the firmament in a way we never see in the cities. There was even a star that hung right above one of the darkened chapels’ steeples, brighter than the rest - a moment full of pathos, I know! But it was a real moment, one that had to be built up to be experienced. Theatrical and beautiful. At its core was a sense of oneness, appreciation, and - most importantly - a clear perception of reality in all its glory.

Meeting family members I see very rarely after a long time away has a similar effect. Even if I’m maybe not in the mood, or would rather stay in bed or watch a film, there’s a feeling of safety and belonging there that feeds the soul. If you’ve spent a lot of time away from home, you’ll know what I mean. The door opens, and they welcome you in - even if you don’t have all that much to talk about and time has frozen the space between you a little. There are open arms and a piece of cake and stories about their lives and the things they’ve done. It’s love and it’s joy. It’s like seeing your friends happy, or getting something you didn’t dare to wish for, or being in a room you know you will always belong in. To me, that’s joy.

Joy grounds you in your body, whilst pleasure allows you to transcend it. Philosophical tradition views pleasure as both a component and essence of happiness, positive feelings or joy, but in the field of psychology it is increasingly treated as a concrete biological phenomenon or experience. The latter is more in line with my own instinctive view of the line between pleasure and joy - that is, pleasure as physical and less emotionally salient than joy, which is a more holistic, all-encompassing feeling capable of triggering a sense of oneness and belonging.

Pleasure

Neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach has found that pleasure follows a cyclical process. First, we want something, then we experience (and, if all goes to plan, like) it, and then our response to the experience ends in learning something from it³. If the cycle runs to plan, and the neural networks involved in experiencing pleasure are functioning as expected, satiety follows and you can move on. If it doesn’t, you can get stuck in a cycle of desire, perhaps without achieving the sensation you were expecting when achieving the thing you desired (see also Freud’s pleasure principle). This is a common feature of addiction and other psychiatric conditions like depression: we expect to feel enjoyment once we achieve X, but when we receive X, the level (or lack) of enjoyment doesn’t match our expectations and we begin to seek it out again.

I often get into a similar cycle after a bit of hedonism. I genuinely enjoy the excitement of snapping up a vintage Coach bag at a charity shop or bingeing a couple of interior design YouTube videos, but my brain keeps expecting something else, something better to follow. Perhaps the secret lies in viewing that activity for what it really is, enjoying it for that, and then moving on to something more rewarding or self-actualising. Or maybe the other that we’re yearning for is a sign that we desire something else in that moment and have simply plugged the gap. Maybe I don’t want to buy, I want to sew. Maybe I don’t want to watch someone else paint a house, and secretly want to paint my own. It’s easier to passively enjoy an echo of pleasure than doing it myself. But it’s far less rewarding in the long run. And also: not everything that feels good, is. Some things, like social media, are really just a colossal waste of our time and our youth, and I wouldn’t even categorise them as truly enjoyable. Stimulating is probably closer to the truth. When I say seek pleasure, I mean real pleasure.⁴ Instead: go have sex, eat a piece of cake, swim in the sea.

So?

In the end, I think we need both. In the garden of delights we’ve created for ourselves, we need to seek out the things that make life worth living: community, friendship, family, purpose. Pleasure and joy go together like sex and love - it’s just that one will have you staring up at the sky, feeling blissful, long after the fireworks are done.

Have a very happy New Year, and see you in 2025!

1. I’ve anglicised the German ‘Glotzen’ here. It means something like gawking, but is often used to refer to overconsumption of media. I think we should start using it in English.

2. The ‘Our Father’ in German.

3. The learning could be as simple as: “Yes, I did end up enjoying that grilled cheese sandwich I just had. I’d probably enjoy having another one in the future.”

4. In the words of Skunk Anansie, Just because it feels good, doesn’t make it right.